It may be a violation of confidentiality to say so, but when Colin Forbes was
proposed for the AIGA Medal there was very little discussion among
the jurors. That did not seem curious until afterward, when I
discovered that I could not think of my favorite Colin Forbes
designs. Other medalists have been strongly associated with
particular works—Milton Glaser with his Dylan poster or New
York Magazine; Paul Rand with his logos for IBM and
Westinghouse; Bill Golden with the CBS eye. Forbes's portfolio
contains no counterparts to those icons. Other medalists, such as
Lester Beall, Gene Federico and Allen Hurlburt, have each been
described as a “designer's designer,” whatever that means. But
whatever it means, I doubt that Colin Forbes has been called that
very often.

He has been called something else though. In introducing him to
a meeting of Art Center College of Design's faculty and trustees,
president David Brown said, “Colin Forbes is unique as a designer
of things that are not normally thought of as being designed.”
That, I think, is the heart of the matter. Throughout most of a
long a spectacularly successful career in graphic design, Forbes
has concentrated his splendid energies on nothing less than
designing the practice of design itself. That makes him a
designer's designer in quite a special sense.

When the brilliant film designer Anton Furst committed suicide
last year, his son offered an insight into the cause: “He always
told me the tools of his trade were a 6B pencil and a store of
putty. He was in control with his pencil; but suddenly he was
dealing with unknown things. He worried about the fact that he
wasn't producing anything. He needed to be drawing.”

Colin Forbes does not need to be drawing. Graphic designers once
used an archaic commercial art term, “on the board,” to describe
what was misleadingly thought of as “actual designing.” Even more
misleading, time on the board was sometimes equated with billable
time. When I asked Colin how much time he spent on the board, he
responded instantly: “None.” (But he does a lot of
cutting-and-pasting, which is done on desk, table or floor for that
matter.)

In Forbes's case, drawing has been superceded by, and
subordinate to, running a large, scattered and complex
organization. That in itself is not an unusual phenomenon, but the
way Forbes approaches it is. One of the common ironies of design is
that the more successful an office gets, the less time the
principals responsible for its success have to design. Instead,
they spend their time sustaining relationships and happy
ships—getting new business and keeping old, making presentations,
going to meetings, directing the work of other people. Forbes does
all of those things, but he does them without resentment or even
resignation. He does not see it as compromise; he sees it as
design, and he likes it.

“There are different ways of designing,” he explains. “Alan
Fletcher might doodle with a logo first, but designing the system,
which might be where I'd start, is no different.”

Most successful designers handle the pressures of business
management in one of three ways. They succumb to it as a necessary
evil, becoming front men for themselves, or for what once was
themselves. Or they develop the rare skill of designing through
other people's minds and hands and talents. Or they resist growth,
and work pretty much by themselves, with perhaps an assistant or
two to do mechanicals, thereby limiting the scale and logistical
complexity of the assignments they can undertake. Forbes took, or
rather cared, another route. He became the chief designer of an
alternative choice called Pentagram, to which he is inextricably
bound both by accident and design.

Born in London in 1928, Forbes studied at the Central School of
Arts and Crafts. “Art school was for misfits,” he says with some
satisfaction. Thrown in with the other misfits, he discovered
generally what he wanted to do, and specifically how far he was
from being able to do it competitively. “I could draw better than
anyone else in the senior class in middle school,” he recalls; but
in art school the ante was raised: “suddenly I was surrounded by
people who all drew better than anyone in the senior
class. And better than I did.”

Forbes gleefully describes Central School as “an organizational
disaster,” a circumstance he credits with leaving students free to
learn. It also left students free not to learn, a freedom
Forbes came perilously close to enjoying fully. One of his
treasured teachers was a wood engraver named John Farleigh, who
said to him one day, “Colin, I can't teach you anything because you
haven't read anything.” Farleigh gave him a list of a dozen books
to read, most of which Forbes can no longer name, although he
remembers that it included Huxley's Brave New World and
Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and that others were by
Dos Passos, Waugh and Dostoyevski. Although none of the books were
about art or design, he regards the reading list as intrinsic to
his learning to be a designer.

“Farleigh was one of a series of wonderful mentors I had,”
Forbes says. Many designers have important mentors, but in Forbes's
case their guidance had to do as much with management as with
design. In the mid-Sixties Ian Hay-Davidson, of Arthur Andersen,
instructed him in issues of partnership. Another mentor was a
printer's representative who “gave me tips about running a business
and introduced me to such simple commercial realities as the need
for cash flow.” Another was Bernard Scott (later Sir Bernard
Scott), chairman of Lucas Industries, who recommended that Forbes
read J.P. Sloan's My Years at General Motors, to learn
something about the diversification of profit centers. He did, and
also learned “the importance of distinguishing between operational
decisions and policy decisions.”

While studying at Central, Forbes worked as assistant to Herbert
Spencer, and upon graduating began doing freelance assignments. At
the same time, he held a lecturing post at Central, which he left
to work as art director with a small advertising agency. Within the
year he returned to the Central School as Head of Graphic Design.
He was 28.

In 1960, largely on the basis of having been retained as design
consultant to Pirelli in England, he left teaching to begin his own
practice. During a visit to the United States, armed with a letter
of introduction to Aaron Burns, he called on Burns and on a number
of designers he admired, including Will Burtin, Gene Federico and
Paul Rand. Among the younger American designers he met, Forbes was
particularly impressed by Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom
Geismar, who, as the fledgling firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff and
Geismar, struck him as “three young guys doing interesting things.”
Back in London in 1962 he joined Alan Fletcher and Bob Gill, an
American living in London, to form Fletcher, Forbes and Gill. They
too were three young guys (all in their early thirties) and at
least two of the first things they did were interesting, if only
because in England they were so unusual: they invested more money
than they could afford in the design of their own offices, and they
undertook a program of self-promotion.

That may really have been the beginning of Forbes's development
into the very special kind of designer he has become. “I had
abilities that complemented theirs,” he says. “I was the one who
planned. This was partly by default—no one else was doing it—and
partly because I was good at it. Actually I'm shy and introverted,
but I do have good people skills and good diplomatic skills. In any
case, I gained more from Fletcher, Forbes and Gill then either
Fletcher or Gill did.”

England was ablaze with creative activity in the early Sixties.
Before our very eyes and ears The Beatles were transmogrified from
a funky Liverpool group into an international musical life force.
The satiric revue “Beyond the Fringe” launched Jonathan Miller,
Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook as comics and social
critics. Mary Quant was influencing the way women designed
themselves.

Graphic design was part of the cultural explosion, and Fletcher,
Forbes and Gill belonged to it. But although they were soon doing
well, they were doing well in a way they had not prepared for and
were unable to control.

“About half of our business,” Forbes says, “was trouble-shooting
for advertising agencies. When an agency was out to get a new
account or to save one they thought was at risk, they would give us
a job on Friday that they wanted by Monday. We felt that we were
being used as a 'hot shop' to build someone else's business, and we
didn't want to continue doing that. We took a hard took at the
situation and decided there were two choices: to become an
advertising agency ourselves or to move into the design mainstream.
The first wasn't really a choice. We didn't have any interest in
becoming an agency and didn't have the competence either. So we
chose mainstream.”

One mainstream project for Fletcher, Forbes and Gill was the
graphics program for the 1965 Triennale in Milan, which they were
doing in collaboration with the architect Theo Crosby. That
experience led the architect and the three graphic designers to
join forces. “Whoever needed a letterhead or a brochure,” Forbes
says, “probably had an office, shop or showroom. Whoever wanted new
offices probably needed mailing pieces.”

It was at this point that the cluster of freelancers began to be
an Organization. At the time he joined them in 1965, Theo Crosby
was working on a town center complex. According to an article by
Michael McNay in Design, “Gill asked him when the first
buildings would go up. 'About 1973,' Crosby said. 'That's a long
time to have to wait for a proof,' Gill said, and shortly after
departed.”

Fletcher, Forbes and Crosby had become a team in order to take
on large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. But when they got such
projects to work on, they found that they still did not have the
requisite disciplines in-house. Designing British Petroleum service
stations, for example, brought the firm face to face with the
problem of gas pumps. Just as they had previously worked with
Crosby on the Triennale, they now collaborated with the young but
already established product designer Kenneth Grange. And just as
the relationship with Crosby had led to his joining them as a
partner, the collaboration with Grange led to his joining
them as a partner. The team, which had by that time strengthened
their graphics capacity with the addition of Mervyn Kurlansky, had
suddenly become five partners in search of a name. Alan Fletcher,
the designer most likely to be caught reading a book about
witchcraft, came across the word “Pentagram” in a book on the
subject. If the rest is design history, it is history that Colin
Forbes, as the founding partner who chaired the partner's policy
meetings for 20 years, had a great deal to do with making and
planning.

But for all his emphasis on the planning aspect of design,
Forbes believes no designer can stray very far from the craft of
design. Even his analytical skills, he believes, were developed by
his designing with type. The other craft that informs all his work
is drawing, and he quotes approvingly a drawing teacher who told
him, “Colin, the reason you don't draw correctly is that you don't
see correctly.” “He was right,” Forbes says, “and if I hadn't been
trying to learn how to draw, I might never have been forced to
learn how to see, which is far more important for a designer.” How
clearly he sees is evident in the work on these pages.

For “The Craftsman's Art,” a catalogue done 20 years ago for a
show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the lettering was
incised in shale by hand, a process less expensive than
phototypesetting and more germane to the subject. The “Connections”
poster for Simpson is, like much of Forbes's work, simultaneously
self-explanatory and intriguing. A brochure for a type house
reverses the image of Laurel and Hardy to illustrate distortion. A
poster explains the metric system (which was then about to become
standard in Britain) in terms of the sizes of objects that are both
familiar and—particularly in juxtaposition—graphically interesting.
Sometimes there are startlingly simple solutions, like the
advertisement signed by great artists and thinkers protesting
museum admission fees.

These pieces seem almost to have an 18th century English
sensibility (at least, stereotypically) in their wit,
reason and clarity—qualities that are also characteristic of
Pentagram . The firm has introduced a certain Age of Reason
civility into design office management. Their celebrated in-house
luncheon facilities are an example, of sorts, but Pentagram
civility is probably best expressed in the firm's publications.
These designers began publishing their own books almost as soon as
they began practicing design! In 1963 Fletcher, Forbes and Gill
produced Graphic Design: Visual Comparisons. In 1972 the
five Pentagram partners published Pentagram: The Work of Five
Designers, followed by Living By Design in 1978, and
Ideas on Design in 1986. A new book, A Pentagram
Compendium, will appear later this year.

In addition, there are the widely admired Pentagon
Papers, which are not a series of documents stolen from the
CIA by Daniel Ellsberg, but a series of small publications issued
occasionally on whatever design-related subjects interest the
partner-editors.

The success of Colin Forbes, and of Pentagram, can be described
as coming close to the simple ideal of liking what you do. In 1978
Forbes established a New York office for Pentagram. It was a risky
move, one no foreign design office had done successfully.

There were, to be sure, some reasons to justify the risk. Half
of the Fortune 500 companies were concentrated in the eastern U.S.
So many American companies were doing business in Europe that an
American-based design office would be in a good position to get
European work. And New York was the world's largest market for
design services. Forbes saw that market as divided between two
kinds of design firms: the traditional offices run by designers,
and the offices that were organized—on the Lippincott and Margulies
model—very much like advertising agencies, with design and
designers subordinate to other disciplines. Pentagram belonged
inescapably to the first category, but Forbes believed they could
offer a managerial sophistication that few traditional offices even
aspired to.

All of that made good sense, but it would have made no sense at
all were it not for the real reason for opening an office
in New York: Colin just plain wanted to live there. His experience
in bringing Pentagram to the U.S. is typical, combining the
passionately personal with the organizationally strategic. He
established a beachhead in George Nelson's office. It was a curious
match, and one that did not last long. Perhaps its most notable
product is the dust jacket Forbes designed for the book Nelson
on Design.

Designing an organization, like designing almost anything else,
carries risks. Guy Laliberte, the former fire-eater who manages the
Canadian circus called Cirque du Soleil, was asked in the Wall
Street Journal whether it was tougher to make a living by
eating fire or by running an organization. “You can get burned
doing both,” Laliberte replied.

If Forbes has been burned, it has not kept him from bringing to
the design community at large the kind of managerial fire-eating he
practiced at Pentagram. From 1976 to 1979 he was president of the
American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Wim Crouwel, who followed him into the AGI presidency, says
Forbes's tenure there betokened a “combination of great designer,
perfect organizer and brilliant manager.” Nancye Green, who
succeeded Forbes as AIGA president, has a more specific
observation: “Colin's contribution, both as a designer and as AIGA
president, has been the translation of business practice into
design practice.”

Professionally, Colin Forbes has gone beyond the complexities of
a large practice to compile an extraordinary record of design
statesmanship. But in design, as in politics, there can be no
statesmanship without citizenship. This year's AIGA Medalist is an
impeccable citizen of the design world.